“This is a pretty rare occurrence, so when it does happen, it’s due to user error, to put it gently,” says Niket Sonpal, M.D., assistant clinical professor at Touro Osteopathic College Of Medicine in New York.

Here’s the deal: Over the course of wearing your contacts for hours, a few things happen. Protein deposits build up on your lens, your eye gets a reduced supply of oxygen, and the surface of the eye starts to dry out.

As your eye gets drier, your contact lens is more likely to get “glued” to the surface of your eye, as was the case with McHugh-Hill. If the lens is stuck and you try to force it out like she did, you can do serious cornea damage.

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